Tuesday, 10 May 2016

Morbid Sons of the Desert

Good public relations: Nusra doesn’t like
the Isis “caliphate” very much, but as long as it remains a Qaeda clone, it
can’t get off America’s terrorist list and qualify to join the (non-existent)
70,000 Syrian “moderates” dreamed up by David Cameron and a lot of American
television networks.

Qatar’s relations
with Nusra raises questions.

It denies direct ties with the
group, and yet six months ago the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel interviewed Nusra’s
leader, Mohamed al-Jolani, who said that it had nothing against
Christians, Alawites or Americans – only that pesky president in Damascus who’s
got Hezbollah, Iran and Russia on his side.

Have no doubts about the Qatar
link.

Nusra boys have just released three Spanish journalists held in
northern Syria for the past 10 months, after which the Qatari state news agency
boasted that the Qatari authorities were involved in freeing them.

You bet they
were.

Had the unlucky three fallen into the hands of those other morbid
sons of the desert, Isis (for whom many Saudis seem to have an unhappy
affection), then the reporters would have had their throats cut on videotape
against a soundtrack of yet more mushy “nasheed” music.

When a group of Christian nuns
fell into Nusra hands in Syria in 2013, Qatar helped to bail them out via
Lebanon – at a reported price of more than $1m a nun – and was duly thanked by
the Lebanese security authorities.

If readers are getting a little bit suspicious,
perhaps wondering if the Qataris are trying to take over the armed Syrian
opposition from Isis and its Saudi Salafist brothers, they may well be right.

But now the flip side of the
story.

Just a week ago, an essay appeared inForeign Policymagazine, the bi-weekly co-founded by
the late Samuel Huntington (ofClash of Civilisations infamy) and now
owned by theWashington Post, no less.

The author
Charles Lister’s thesis, if such it can be called, is that al-Qaeda is trying
to take total control of the Nusra and overshadow Isis through an
unprecedented debate within its ranks to “integrate into the ‘mainstream
opposition’”.

The “mainstream opposition” presumably refers to the
fictional 70,000-strong legions beloved of Dave Cameron and, presumably, the
future US President Hillary Clinton.

Nusra, according to Lister,
is “rebuilding a military coalition and plans to soon initiate major offensive
operations south of Aleppo” in order to spoil US and Russian efforts for a
truce in the city.

The best way of thwarting Al-Qaeda’s ambitions “is to
dramatically scale up assistance to vetted [sic] military and civil components
[sic, again] of the mainstream opposition inside Syria,” he writes.

All this,
of course, because we’ve so far given “insufficient backing” to those “moderate
elements of the opposition” who can’t compete with the “battlefield power and
capacity to control territory” of Nusra.

So far, so good.

Far from
breaking free of al-Qaeda, Lister’s version of Nusra suggest that it’s
been ever more deeply penetrated by al-Qaeda – or “Al-Qaeda Central”, as he
calls it – to the point where Saif al-Adel, “the most influential living
al-Qaeda figure other than Zawahiri”, has arrived in Syria.

And Adel has done
so “almost certainly”, as Lister adds reassuringly, with “three other key
al-Qaeda figures”.

These guys are now supposedly
discussing the setting up of yet another “emirate” in Syria’s Idlib province.

But the
recent cessation of hostilities “catalyzed a dramatic re-empowerment of Syria’s
moderate protest movement and the revitalisation of the most [sic, yet again]
moderate elements of the opposition”.

An anonymous Free Syrian Army (ie: ‘moderate’) commander
is quoted by Lister as confirming that al-Qaeda forces “represent everything we
are opposed to, they are the same as the regime. But what can we do when our
supposed friends abroad give us nothing to assert ourselves?”

What
“a broad spectrum of Syria’s opposition” need, therefore, is “a substantial
expansion of military, political and financial assistance”.

These Free Syrian Army groups,
Lister says, now number 50 – phew! – vetted by the CIA, all of which “operate
in coordination with locally legitimate [sic yet once more] civil, political
and judicial bodies”.

So who is the writer Charles Lister?

Among his various
academic duties, he’s a senior consultant for the “Shaikh Group’s Track II
Syria Initiative”.

The“shaikh”in question is not a Middle East
potentate but Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre in Qatar and
fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy, formerly the Saban Centre for
Middle East Policy (the“Saban”being
Haim Saban, the American-Israeli film and television mogul who donated $13m to
the centre and has given substantial funds to Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign).

Lister, according to his various CVs, was a visiting
fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre and has helped negotiate a process of
“engagement with the leaderships of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups”.

Which is an awful lot of rebels – far more than the 70,000 conjured up by Dave
Cameron.

So what’s going on down in Doha?

The Brookings Doha
Centre belongs to the Brookings Institute and its co-chair is Sheikh Hamad bin
Jassim bin Jaber bin Thani al-Thani, a member of the Qatari ruling family and
former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.

Is the real debate, therefore – far
from being thrashed out in Idlib province – really going on down in Qatar,
whose present leadership has gone a long way to clean up Nusra’s reputation and
to present it as the real moderate“opposition”which
deserves all that CIA help?

A final point. Isis has been
bloody quiet recently, in every sense of the word. No gory videos, no
nasheed songs.

Why? Because it’s losing ground to the Syrians and their
allies? Because it lost Palmyra?

Or because it’s waiting to find
out whether Nusra is going to be the darling of the Syrian opposition –
and thus America and Europe – or targeted by all of us as an even more
apocalyptic version of Isis?